DAY 23 - MEMORY - INNOVATION - QUICK - SURPRISE
Which to do…? With some of these prompts I’ve had a hard time coming up with anything. Today, I had a few different ideas for each, but not sure which I could actually flesh out to more than a sentence or two… I think the easiest would be to focus on memory, specifically some of my salient memories of how I got started in all of this…
I’m not sure where I first heard of D&D I might have heard about the concerns of the satanic panic (and heard of Mazes and Monsters - but never saw it) I know it was mentioned briefly in the movie Taps (1981 - staring very young Timothy Hutton, Sean Penn, and Tom Cruise - one of my favourite movies as a young pre-teen… or… pre-pre-teen, I guess I was nine when it came out) I think it also made a brief appearance in E.T. (also a favourite that year!). I can’t remember if I saw an actually copy of the game or the Endless Quest books which came out that same year.
The first physical copy of Dungeons and Dragons that I saw was the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set (Second Edition) which included the red-covered basic rules and a copy of Keep on the Borderlands. Strangely, the place that ai saw it was a small toy store in the Wildwood Mall (which later combined - via underground tunnel -with the newer Circle Centre Mall to become the Centre at Circle and 8th). I’d bought Playmobil and smurfs and other action figures in that same toy store. The D&D game - and a small handful of Ral Partha miniatures display case at the back of the store near some standard family board games of the era and a couple of Avalon Hill “bookcase games” (Panzer Leader? Outdoor Survival?).
It was the miniatures that REALLY caught. My eye. I’d had loads of plastic toy soldiers and models in 1/35 (and later 1/72), but those were almost exclusively World War Two models at that point (I think later I had an American Revolution set red British and blue Americans, and maybe a box of Napoleonic French in grey?). I was THRILLED by the idea of knights and wizards and fantasy creatures in miniature!
Somehow I convinced my parents to buy it and my dad to play it with me - I did not know any other kids that played it at that point. My Dad read the rules and ran the game to start, but I was just too excited and full of ideas and quickly took over the role of DM.
My dad played a Cleric names Zaddoc and a thief named Runkha. We ALWAYS played D&D with multiple characters in that day - it wasn’t until years later and encountering different RPGs that I was even aware of the concept of playing a SINGLE character! Some time later I discovered two kids at my school that played D&D. Chris who I only played briefly with over a summer before he went to a different school, then Paul, who moved away the following year. Later I went to a different school… met a couple new friends, played different games (Top Secret, Star Frontiers… later Palladium games) .
Skipping ahead, my next salient MEMORY is in my first year of high school. I met J.C. waiting out front of Miss Roger’s Grade 9 History class. He’s spotted me reading REvsed Recon in the hall and recognized it and came over to chat and invited me to join a D&D campaign just starting up with some of his elementary school friends, Christian and Paul. For the rest of grade nine we met every Sunday at Paul’s mom’s place and played all afternoon wandering through the Temple of Elemental Evil.
I played a Human fighter and a halfling thief. I know Christian had a wizard… someone had a Paladin and someone had a cleric…? Maybe a Ranger…? The halfling collected all the jewelry that he could. I had a long list of all the jewelry that had been found - what they were made of and their value - he wore ALL of it. The other players couldn’t understand WHY I didn’t sell it in town when we went back for provisions and buy… stuff..?
It was one of the longest campaigns I ever played in and still have very fond memories of it, despite how it all ended. I missed one session which wrapped up the campaign and Paul, the DM, let the others use my characters as meat shields in the final battle. They both died and just about everyone else survived and made off with all the loot - including looting all the jewelry that my halfling had collected.
My other thought that I’ll touch on briefly is how much INNOVATION there has been in role-playing games SINCE those early days of D&D or AD&D - where you only got experience points for killing things and collecting treasure. Occasionally my son will dig out the books and make “old school” characters with his friends and laugh at how “absurd” the system is… I pretty much dropped D&D as soon as I discovered new games that focused on things other than slaying orcs.
I have to say I DO appreciate all that INNOVATION that has taken place and love so much of all the games that are currently available, but none of that diminishes the fantastic, magical memories of those early days of play. We made due with what we had and despite there being little systemic encouragement to do so, MUCH role-playing happened if you were playing with the right people.
As fond as those memories are, I have no desire to go back and play those same games - as many of my generation do - with the original games or games like Dungeon Crawl Classics. There’s so much better stuff to do, now!
Once again ended up prattling on MUCH longer than I meant to…
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